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New Ammunition from the Barnual Cartridge Plant, Part 2 of 2

Marco Vorobiev was a member of the elite Soviet Spetsnaz in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He’s a U.S. citizen now and conducts training courses that draw on his special forces training. He’ll have a new installment every Wednesday.

As we toured the Barnaul Cartridge Plant during our recent trip to Russian, the good folk at there introduced several new additions to their product line bound for the American market. Last week I mentioned two new steel-cased loads for the.45 ACP that will become available stateside shortly.

Another new steel-case cartridge that would be bound shortly for our shores is the zinc-coated 9mm Kurz or .380. Though the new .380 cartridge was good news, especially in view of recent .380 ammo popularity with subcompact handguns and resulting ammo shortages, nothing was more exciting that to look at, touch and witness testing of steel-cased 6.5 Grendel ammunition. It was like witnessing a birth.

At last reasonably priced steel-cased 6.5 Grendel will be coming to the USA. I have to slow down a notch here as what we saw was pre-production prototypes. However, the Barnaul Testing Facility’s personnel fired several rounds though the ballistic barrel stand. The accuracy at 100 meters was OK, but not what you would expect from the Grendel round, but it was still within Russian military set parameters. And as the development of the final production round continues, we should see reasonably priced high quality 6.5 Grendel ammo stateside very soon.

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Paul Wood

Looks like a people to people contact and interaction would work far better than inherent govt. to govt. conflicts. This seems to be a great example of that possibility. Who really wants to fight with people you have come to know as friends and acquaintances with similar interests. Shooting as a sport instead of conflict, sounds good to me.
. Paul Wood

Kevin

Shush, the govt. might hear you and go and then they will get involved and ruin it.

searchert

Why in deed komrad. We the people of this planet are not each other's inherent enemy. It is propoganda and manipulative bullcrap of illuminatti backed gov't that preach hate and manipulate to put us at each other's throat.

Peter

Not really interested in steel casing ammo since it tends to chew up guns, something most of us cannot afford to do, unlike that of a nice soft brass casing. Also, I like to keep my purchases to American made products whenever possible, so for a few extra bucks, I will help support the American manufacturers. If all the ammo eventually gets outsourced, our only option will be this cheap ammo. Don't count me in.

Dolf

I try to buy American, but when the American producers assign everything to the government and then artificially dry up the civilian market, I have no choice. When it comes to defensive ammunition, I don't want to spend a premium for the American producers taking advantage of the election scare. I want to to have as many rounds as I can in the event I DO need them. If I don't, then I have plenty of cheap plinking ammo. If the American manufacturers want me to purchase their products, they need to get the prices back down and stop raping the American people through these political scares.
…Just my two cents.

Erwos

They've been talking about that steel-cased ammo for more than half a year already. When are they actually going to start shipping this stuff? At 25c a round, I'd be all over it, even if the accuracy wasn't completely amazing.

Truman

Who ever would shoot this c—- must not care much about his firearms, I've tried several different steel case ammo and as long as people use it that will drive up the price of repairs to your firearms. Thank you for shooting this c— it just keeps me busy repairing firearms so just stand in line and I will get your parts in as soon as possible to fix your firearm. So you save a few cent shoot and you fatten my wallet.